The First Step to Smarter Spending
00:00:00.000 | One of the things that I would encourage everyone to do
00:00:02.380 | if you go through this process yourself
00:00:04.280 | is first, go find some way to categorize
00:00:07.900 | where you spend money.
00:00:08.920 | Now, if you only have a couple of credit cards,
00:00:11.080 | most issuers have like an annual summary.
00:00:14.140 | So you could go pull up the end of year 2024 summary
00:00:17.160 | and it usually breaks down your spending by category.
00:00:19.620 | For us, we have so many cards across so many issuers
00:00:22.200 | that compiling all that data together
00:00:23.900 | would take a lot of work.
00:00:24.960 | And I know for some of them, it's a PDF.
00:00:26.880 | Obviously, I could probably just throw all those
00:00:28.920 | into ChatGPT and ask a question,
00:00:30.560 | which now that I'm thinking about that process
00:00:32.920 | might've been easier.
00:00:33.600 | But we also use a app called Copilot
00:00:36.800 | to do all of our budgeting.
00:00:37.880 | I'm a huge fan of it.
00:00:39.320 | And that makes it really easy for us to go and say,
00:00:41.800 | where do we spend all our money?
00:00:42.960 | Because we categorize all our transactions.
00:00:44.800 | So I can go in and say, how much did we spend on dining?
00:00:47.560 | How much did we spend on these various categories?